Gratitude Blocks: Three Things You Need to Know

Gratitude blocks get in the way of positive feelings.
Understand these three things and release what gets in the way of feeling good.

Gratitude Blocks and Feeling Good
We all want to feel positive feelings and minimize or eliminate negative feelings. So why is it sometimes hard to shift out of difficult states and generate good feelings?

We must kindly realize we are human and our nature is to experience the full range of human emotion. Contrary to popular belief it is a gift to be able to feel and directly experience all of life, not just the ecstatically happy, peaceful or blissed out, joyful aspects. This being said, it is healthy and desirable to have the capacity to process emotion through our systems and not get stuck in negative states.

Gratitude Blocks Have Been Well Practiced
We need to acknowledge that we have had a lifetime of running thought-feeling “default” patterns through our body-mind systems. The result is deeply ingrained patterns that run on automatic creating not only habitual thought patterns but also a feeling set point, something like a tone we emanate or a baseline we operate from out of full awareness. We are often more aware of how others are “toning” than we are of our own

Gratitude Blocks Require Focused Techniques to Dissolve Them
We need to practice tools/techniques/methods that will help create a new infrastructure for positive feelings to travel over in order to have ease with shifting out of problem states. Most of us cannot simply will ourselves to move out of a negative state, especially an intense one, at a moment’s notice when we do not have the inner structure to support that. In addition, the sense that one can will themselves into a different state is often a false assumption as the energy has not really been dissipated but only displaced or suppressed out of consciousness.

Gratitude Blocks and Science
Fortunately we live in a time when we have more information than ever to help us understand how our body-mind works. Knowing the science behind feeling good is important but just as important is having methods that help you to implement and integrate that information.

Here are some resources for the science behind gratitude and happiness:

http://psychfaculty.gmu.edu/kashdan/publications.php

http://www.iamthankful.com/science/gratitude-interventions-project-by-dr-robert-emmons